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Few people really have a handle on what having children will do to their lives. There are clear implications, of course: kids are noisy, messy and expensive. These are all true, but theory is so much more gentle than reality.

Having children is a little like introducing a hereto unknown creature into your home and being given only the most basic instructions on how to care for it– or, more realistically, how not to kill it. When our first child was born, my husband and I sat in the living room and stared down at her screaming face and both had the same thought: who the hell let us have a baby? This isn’t an original thought. Women come equipped with hands to hold and diaper and breasts to feed, and all those funny hormones and brain chemicals to do these things, but logic is not included. On her third night of crying and refusing to nurse, I tried to formulate a plan wherein I could give my daughter away without all the grandparents getting pissed off. My best friend has a similar story, calling her husband at work and asking if it would really be so bad if she put the baby outside. Just for a couple hours, she said.

You have no idea what you’re getting into. I stood in the middle of my destroyed living room, holding a squalling baby, unshowered, and looked at my trio of cats, wailing: “Why wasn’t I satisfied with you?”

There is no guide to caring for children, not really. There are handbooks of the obvious: feed them, don’t shake them, tell them you love them and try not to have a screaming melt-down in front of them too often. I do all of those things fairly well, and have watched many other women pull them off too. Where we all find ourselves adrift is when you get to the non-obvious, like how to react when your daughter decides to jam a spoon down her newborn brother’s throat because she’s helpfully “feeding the baby” or your son drops his pants anytime he’s somewhere vaguely indoors to show everyone how far he can stretch his foreskin.

These situations are the ones that drove great women in the past to invent such things as playpens, pre-school and Long Island Ice Tea.

Learning to parent is nothing like learning to ride a bike. It’s painful, tedious and can result in more than just a skinned knee when you consider you’re in charge of shaping a whole new person and really doesn’t want to be the mother of “that girl on The Hills.” In this vein, most of the women I know with children have adopted a ranking system of what they can make themselves care about. None are exactly the same, but the basics seem to be similar, all of them centering around keeping them alive and relatively unfucked up. Specifics get thrown out the window. All you want to do is survive.

The larger they get, the more complicated kids become. Both of mine will be in school this fall, leaving me to collapse in my fainting chair and moan about how my babies have moved on while secretly plotting how I’ll be renovating their bedroom when they officially move out in fourteen years—anything to keep me from vodka at two in the afternoon.

I’m hoping things get smoother as they get older. I’m also realistic and know that my mother is reading this and rubbing her hands together, cackling like a witch on a mountaintop. I’m an idealistic person, but the mothers of teenagers get teary when I tell them about my son whipping his sister with a jump rope. “They’re so sweet at that age,” they bemoan, looking over at the lanky person in black who both wants them dead and a ride to the mall.

In the end, it’s about one goal: raising a human being you don’t want to back your car over. It’s been my vision of success, since my daughter first used the word “fuck” in context, to raise a child who, at the age of twenty-one, I actually like. So far, so good, I think. I admit, I’ve got a good long time to fuck up, to make my very own Heidi Montag– whose mother, I’m sure loves her plastic Barbie face just to death– but, if experience tells me anything, at least when my girl is famous for existing, she’ll do it with a stained shirt, the ability to curse creatively and tell people: “This is all my mom’s fault.” That will be a proud day in my life: my baby, in all her glory, making me drink.